One man’s search for harmony on the West Bank
In the spring of 1996, a pair of bullet-proof Chevy Suburbans pulled into the West Bank refugee camp of Al Amari, bearing an American chamber-music ensemble to teach music to the camp’s children. The Oslo process had brought a brief lull to 48 years of Israeli-Palestinian hostility, an interim Palestinian state in nearby Ramallah and a promise of something the country had never really seen: normality.
This well-meaning silliness was typical of the “diplomatic cultural initiatives” that often occur in such thaws, devised in this case by the US Consulate General in Jerusalem. The seven-mile journey, taking hours to get past checkpoints, was all for one day’s teaching of foreign music to kids who’d grown up among tanks and barbed wire. Yet something magical happened that day for one of those children, Ramzi Aburedwan.
At 17, among the oldest assembled, he was certainly the most well-known. A photojournalist’s image of Ramzi at eight, grimly but determinedly throwing a stone at Israeli tanks, had made him the icon of the first intifada, the six-year uprising (1987-93) against occupation and the growth of Israeli settlements. The eldest of four children living with their grandfather, he’d been known in the camp as a quiet, determined boy of the streets, delivering newspapers on a bicycle his grandfather had salvaged from the trash. That street knowledge had kept him alive on the day he threw his first stone, with his parkour-like flight from the bullets of the soldiers’ Galil assault rifles down the alleys and across the rooftops of Al Amari.
By 1996 he was a determined young man with almost no English and a pronounced stutter, who surprised the visitors by sounding an almost perfect G on a viola during his lesson. Before their return to Jerusalem, the ensemble performed Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G Minor. One element of that music changed Ramzi’s life, instantly and forever.
“Four melodies at once?” he recalls almost two decades later. “I was shocked by it, terribly confused. In Arabic music, the orchestra plays only the one.” As a child of the intifada, music had meant the staticky reception of Israel’s Arabic station on his grandfather’s old radio and folk songs of the occupation, sung around a burning garbage can at night. The word “harmony” wasn’t in his vocabulary. To hear four different, at times conflicting voices coexisting, even building upon each other, was utterly alien. “But also so beautiful,” he says. “So mysterious.”
As he began to explore the viola more deeply, a seed was planted: the idea of music schools for the children of the occupied territories. Eventually to be called Al Kamandjâti – the Violinist – these would help bring culture, hope and what he would later call the “face of a state” to a land that had been largely without all three for half a century. When Palestinians speak of what was lost in the Nakba – their exodus and refugee life after the creation of Israel – farms, fields and houses are most usually invoked. “But the musical life of Palestine was quite active before 1948,” Ramzi tells me. “Famous singers and players, ensembles, orchestras. They thought their life as refugees would end, soon, and music was never seen to. Over time, it became only songs of protest and imprisonment; not love, life, faith, nature. The normal.”
The word normal comes up constantly the afternoon Ramzi and I spend talking. The distant peals of laughter and shouts of children in the nursery school playground of Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, a few miles north of Washington DC, underscore precisely what normal means to the softly spoken Ramzi: the simple day-to-day of life.
The church is hosting a two-week tour of the States by Dal’Ouna, the world music ensemble Ramzi has led for more than a decade, playing the bouzouk, a five-string Arabic folk instrument. Now 36, Ramzi is a professional, even world-class violist, but the bouzouk has become his primary means of making music – alongside his other work, administering and fund-raising for Al Kamandjâti, which now has eight branches in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon, with 500 students a year and another 2,500 visited in primary schools, and 15 alumni have become music professionals. It also sponsors seasonal music festivals, a half-dozen ensembles and a full orchestra.
Many children were throwing stones the day Ramzi’s picture was taken, but Ramzi – whose name means “symbol” in Arabic – seems strangely destined to be symbolic: of the peaceful struggle of a population often demonised for its violence; of its regeneration through the power of music; of the hope of coexistence in conflicted lands.
Ramzi fled from the soldiers’ bullets down the alleys and across the rooftops of the Al Amari camp.
A year after the American musicians’ 1996 visit to Al Amari, he was awarded a scholarship to a summer music programme in the US. After his return to Palestine a poster bearing images of him as a child throwing his stone and as a young man playing his viola plastered walls there. He auditioned for a place at the French Conservatoire d’Angers with Tchaikovsky’s Flight of the Bumblebee. “In that frenzy of notes, I saw myself running from soldiers through the alleys of Al Amari. I would read stories, about collaboration and coexistence, and it was as though peace was just around the corner,” recalls Ramzi. But nothing could be further from the truth. A second intifada had begun in 2000. Holiday returns home were greeted by the spectacle of cars flattened by tanks, buildings pockmarked by 50mm shells, barricaded or demolished outright, and fresh tales of children lost.
When he recruited 15 French musicians to tour the West Bank and Gaza with him that summer there were 757 checkpoints, rammed-earth blockades, roadblocks and other physical barriers to pass, including the new 25ft West Bank barrier. Smiles of children would greet them at each camp or village, and Ramzi could sense the same magic and hope he’d felt on hearing the Brahms quartet. “But absolutely no feeling of normalcy,” he realised. “Just a brief respite from tanks and bullets. I’d never known normal until I got to the States the first time, and then in France, sitting in a café, studying, being free to walk down any street, to go to the sea in summer.” Growing up an hour’s drive from four different seas, Ramzi saw the Mediterranean just three times in his childhood. He only learned to swim at the age of 20.
He founded the first Al Kamandjâti school in a disused stone building on a narrow Ramallah street in 2005, got married and had two children (now three and six). He was also invited to join the West-Eastern Divan, the orchestra of Israeli and Arabic musicians created by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. As he is quick to tell you, his participation in the orchestra was “political, symbolic. I’m not the world’s greatest violist.” But the staunchly pro-Palestinian Barenboim regularly included him in press conferences from Berlin to Salzburg to Andalusia.
Ramzi repeatedly asked Barenboim to issue a statement condemning the human-rights violations of occupation and the ever-growing West Bank settlements. But Barenboim had his Israeli musicians to protect, as well as the Divan’s depoliticising mission of co-operation and co-existence. “Yes, they wanted peace, and they valued the same peace and harmony I experienced in performances,” says Ramzi. “But it was a lie.” He and Barenboim parted ways in 2011; to Ramzi’s sadness, the Divan is now boycotted in Palestine.
In intifada you had a need to say, ‘I’m oppressed,’ and you said it with a stone. But it was the same with the viola
The break, however, helped solidify Ramzi’s understanding of what Al Kamandjâti should be. “The students were all very different. Some were quite political [a boy, Oday, with a beautiful voice and great command of protest songs who went on to tour internationally with Dal’Ouna, and a girl violinist, Alá, who lived next to the original school building in Ramallah] but many more were just kids, kids with school and friends and family, and I found great peace in them getting a musical education, and if it was in their future, perhaps a professional career in music. I had no desire to politicise them.”
As for picking up the stone, he never regretted it. “It was an almost pacifist tool of expression for me, never about violence. In intifada, you simply had a need to say ‘I’m oppressed’ and you said it with a stone. But it was the same with the viola.” Ramzi says his two greatest concerts have both been performances of Mozart’s Sixth Symphony in F Major. The first was in the summer of 2011, in the hills above Battir, a village of Palestinian farmers working picturesque terraced fields. A train line runs past it to most of the refugee camps which were created by the 1949 armistice. His vision was that the train would carry Mozart through to the camps. Though heard only by the orchestra, composed of Palestinian and visiting foreign musicians, the concert moved Haaretz journalist Amira Hass to write a play about the performance, the train and Ramzi.
The second concert, three years later, is the one Ramzi seems proudest of. The Qalandia checkpoint, just outside Jerusalem, is a fortified terminal of prison-like kennel runs laced with barbed wire, set against a heavily graffitied section of the West Bank barrier. Arriving by bus, the 24-piece orchestra quickly unloaded and began performing the Sixth Symphony before the guards realised what was happening.
“Some of the Palestinians, who’d already been waiting for hours to pass the checkpoint, remained until we’d finished,” he recalls. “But it was the soldiers I watched most. For this was true resistance. A musical intifada. We are no longer fighting you with stones, but with sound. So how would they react?
“One woman soldier got on her phone, quite frantic. ‘There’s an orchestra here! What are we to do?’ She came up to another soldier, who was just looking at us. She asked him: ‘What is to be done?’ I have to admit I was rather curious myself. He only…” Ramzi imitates the man tapping his fingers on his chest, keeping time.
“She put her phone down, started listening, and for a few seconds, it was as though there was no checkpoint, no line in the sand, or if there was, you simply didn’t know who was inside that line and who was outside.”
An extract from Children of the Stone
Source: www.theguardian.com